Let's do it!
| McDonalds 2013 | McDonalds 2018 | |
|---|---|---|
| Company Owned Locations | 6,738 | 2,770 |
| Franchise Locations | 28,691 | 35,085 |
We can already see that McDonalds has shed many company owned locations in favor of franchise owned. This distributes the liability of employees to the franchisees. So there is one direct impact of the minimum wage that will affect local, small businesses to a greater degree than it will the large corporation. Raised wages will cripple the small business owner, and only trickle-up to the corporation.
| Company-operated restaurant expenses ($millions) | |
|---|---|
| Food & paper | 3,153.8 |
| Payroll & employee benefits | 2,937.9 |
| Occupancy & other operating expenses | 2,174.2 |
| Franchised restaurants-occupancy expenses | 1,973.3 |
| Selling, general & administrative expenses | 2,200.2 |
They directly employ 210,000 employees as of 2018. I don't have how many are employed by francisees. So we'll have to extrapolate franchise employees. If we do, we get about 2.5 million franchise employees. Previously, only about half of all employees were US-based. So, let's say only 1.25 million franchise employees are in the US, and we will ignore the McDonald's corporate employees, because we're not sure how many are salary versus hourly. And if we say 20% of the franchise employees are salary, that gives us a cool one million employees to work with.
| 1,000,000 McDonalds employees in the US |
| $7.50 minimum wage |
| $15.00 desired wage |
| 550,000,000 Big Macs sold per year |
Let's do math! (FUN!)
1,000,000 x ($15.00 - $7.50) = an additional $7,500,000 to employ all McDonalds employees for one hour.We just learned a few things. In the last six years since I first wrote the "Billion Dollar Big Mac", McDonalds has undergone some changes. First, they've shed corporate employees, but overall employment has risen. Second, the price of a Big Mac has nearly doubled. Lastly, the effect of the minimum wage has only worsened.
but they don't all work at the same time... let's assume there are many more part-time workers than full time... and let's estimate each worker works and average of only 20 hours during any given week... we'll estimate low, just y'know, because we don't want to be unrealistic.
$7,500,000 x 20 = an additional $150,000,000 to pay for one week of all McDonalds employees.
there are 52 weeks in a year... usually.
$150,000,000 x 52 = an additional $7,800,000,000 to pay the additional wages of all McDonalds employees for one full year.
that's 7.8 Billion additional dollars... that has to come from somewhere... like raising the price of Big Macs.
$7,800,000,000 / 550,000,000 = an additional $14.18 per Big Mac.
what are they now, like $4.39?... so a Big Mac would cost $18.57 plus tax... no fries... no shake.
And who does it still effect? The poor and the small business owners.
the "rich" don't pay for Big Macs... it's the working poor... it's the same people who work at places like McDonalds who then shop and eat at places like McDonalds... it's us... we have to come up with $7.8 billion dollars.
sources:
https://rvolt24.blogspot.com/2013/08/billion-dollar-big-mac.html
https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/investors-relations/financial-information/sec-filings.html
http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000063908/94ad07bd-66c3-433c-a81e-94f1587b0ed8.pdf
https://www.reference.com/food/many-big-macs-sold-day-225cf538abc342ab
EDIT (2021-03-09):
Proof: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28506/w28506.pdf
Proof: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28506/w28506.pdf